Wireless networks rely on a large number of individual base stations to provide high capacity wireless services over large coverage areas such as market areas (e.g., cities), surrounding residential areas (e.g., suburbs, counties), highway corridors and rural areas. Continuous radio connectivity across these large coverage areas is accomplished via user mobility from one base station to others as the user traverses the network's operating area. High reliability mobility in mobile wireless networks minimizes the number of dropped calls or other abnormal discontinuations of radio service to the supported users.
Self-Organizing or Self-Optimizing Network (SON) technology provides automated processes that support the configuration and optimization of communication networks. For example, SON optimization processes may continuously run on a network in order to continuously monitor and/or optimize the performance of the network and the network elements (e.g., base stations, cell sites, cells, and so on) in the network. SON processes may be limited in their reach in a network, where some SON processes only run for certain network elements (e.g., elements within a suburb), while other SON processes run for other network elements (e.g., elements along a highway corridor).
As networks evolve, cells and other network elements are added to different areas within a network in order to meet and satisfy the ever-changing communication and data transfer demands placed on the network. However, a changing network may cause problems with respect to the typical SON technology used to optimize performance of the network, because the optimization processes provided by the typical SON technology often rely on static definitions of network elements to target, leading to a suboptimal performance and/or configuration of the network and associated network elements, among other problems.